Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Rothbard: "Listen, YAF!"

An excellent article. And one in which it often seems as if Rothbard is warning us to stay away from Hoppeans:

This open letter is addressed to the libertarians attending the YAF national convention in St. Louis this Labor Day weekend. Notice I said the libertarians in YAF; I have nothing to say to the so-called "traditionalists" (a misnomer, by the way, for we libertarians have our traditions too, and they are glorious ones. It all depends on which traditions: the libertarian ones of Paine and Price, of Cobden and Thoreau, or the authoritarian ones of Torquemada and Burke and Metternich.) Let us leave the authoritarians to their Edmund Burkes and their Crowns of St. Something-or-other...

How come I am an exile from the Right-wing, while the conservative movement is being run by a gaggle of ex-Communists and monarchists? What kind of a conservative movement is this? This kind: one that you have no business being in...

You can see for yourselves that you have nothing in common with the frank theocrats, the worshippers of monarchy, the hawkers after a New Inquisition, the Bozells and the Wilhelmsens. Yet you continue in harness with them. Why? Because of the siren songs of the so-called "fusionists" — the Meyers and Buckleys and Evanses — who claim to be integrating and synthesizing the best of "tradition" and liberty...

His comments on torture are just as relevant today:

The cops, with their monopoly of coercion and their overwhelming superiority of arms, tend to brutalize, club, and torture confessions from people who are either innocent or have not been proven guilty. What has been the attitude of the Right-wing, and your fusionist leaders, toward this systematic brutality, or toward the libertarian decisions of the Warren Court that have put up protections for the individual rights of the accused? You know very well. They hate the Warren Court almost as much as they do Reds, for "coddling criminals," and the cry goes up everywhere for all power to the police. What can be more profoundly statist, despotic, and anti-libertarian than that?